


But I Do

by daughterofthesun



Category: Reylo - Fandom, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Divergence, F/M, Finnpoe on the side, Fix-it fic, Kylo Ren Redemption, Rey and Ben sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G, Reylo - Freeform, To An Extent, multi-chapter, ongoing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21991801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daughterofthesun/pseuds/daughterofthesun
Summary: Ben, despite the innumerable amount of pain he feels, smiles for the first time since his youth, he thinks.Rey can’t believe how beautiful it is, how lucky she is. She is going to kiss him again, she thinks.And then he falls.She falls with him. “No, no, no, no, no,” she murmurs. “Stay with me, Ben. Stay with me.”// Or the one in which I rewrite the ending and Ben Solo lives, and then Rey has to make the most difficult but obvious choice of her life.
Relationships: Kylo Ren & Rey, Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 37
Kudos: 316





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> There’s quite the handful of Reylo fix-it fics on here right now, which I think is beautiful. Thanks for clicking on mine.
> 
> This is my attempt to balance what I wanted to see happen at the end of this story with something I think actually could have happened onscreen in this franchise, and not just my wild fantasy. (Well the wild fantasy might come up as an addendum. But we’ll see.)
> 
> Canon compliant up until Ben’s death. We not gon do that again on this day.
> 
> This is my first time ever writing an all-knowing third-person POV narrative. Right now, I’m planning on writing two full chapters and an epilogue. I hope this heals you.

Rey stumbles forward, eyes blinking rapidly, stars lighting the edges of her vision.

_I did it_ , she thinks. She can still feel the spirits of the Masters with her. They are proud. One in particular is more gloating than the others.  _We did it_.

She staggers, tries her hardest to keep her footing. Both sabers fall to the floor. The edges of her vision go black.

_I did it._

She falls.

* * *

In the Millenium Falcon, Finn falls against the wall, sunken by a feeling.

She’s gone.

”Rey,” he begins to cry. “ _No_.”

* * *

A single hand protrudes out from the chasm, gripping itself to the edge of the opening. Ben Solo pulls himself up and onto the ledge, heaves himself over determinedly. He sees her body lying still on the cold ground, and his gut wrenches. He thinks to fly to her, seeing nothing, feeling nothing — nothing but her and the unwanted relief left by the sudden lightness of their tether, her opposite pole dissipated, the invisible line normally taut with tension now snapped and limp. The Emperor could still be before her, alive, bolts of vibrating particles of the force sparking from his newly re-formed fingertips, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Because Rey is dead.

He falls, the pain from his definitely broken leg, fractured arm, and fractured ribs pushing past his concern to the forefront of his consciousness. He tries to center himself, to use the force as his strength, but he cannot even begin to calm himself enough to attempt such an act. He pulls himself up from the ground and begins to drag his fatally injured body over to Rey’s unmoving one. He drops beside her, every joint, muscle, and bone screaming in agony, and immediately scoops her up into his arms.

As he holds her in his lap is when his worst fears are imagined. There is no flow in her veins, no beat in her heart, no life in her eyes. Her eyes which are opened and look straight to the skies. Her eyes which do not meet his.

_No_.

He pulls her to him, holding on to whatever fragments of her soul might be left, if one were to believe in the presence of such, clutching for dear life that her body might not dissolve into the force and leave him forever. She cannot leave him. Not now. Not after they’ve just won. Not after she’d saved him. Not after he’d returned to the light. If she goes now, what had it all been for?

_Her body._

_It’s still here._

_She’d saved him once._

_There’s still a chance._

He lays her down, then, his free hand moving at once to the spot on his abdomen where she’d slain him before, the spot which she’d selflessly and with the last hope she’d had left healed with a touch only moments later.  _There is still some of her left. It’s inside of me. That’s why she is still here. That’s why she has not moved on._

He places his hand now to her abdomen instead, exhales slowly, and closes his eyes. If there is still some of her left inside of him, he will give it back.

He isn’t sure how... he hadn’t even known it to be possible. He’d only seen it done once before. But if their minds are still linked, and she knows how to use the force to heal, then the knowledge is somewhere inside of him, too. He just has to find it.

He stills. He draws himself in. He finds the force. He feels it around him. When at first it was erratic, chaotic, unhinged in this space, it has now stilled and soothed. He feels it within himself, deep down in the very core of him, where a soul might be if one believed in such old-world things. He manifests it as a tangible thing in his mind. He lifts it up and over and down through his arm and into Rey‘s middle. When he doesn’t feel immediate movement from the lifeless body in his arms, he ought to worry, but that is not the jedi way. A jedi, he may not be, but a jedi his first master was.

And a jedi Rey has just proved herself to have become.

It happens in this order:

He feels the line tighten with the weight of an opposing force at its opposite end,

he feels her take a single breath, 

and her hand shoots up to top his own.

* * *

It is dark where Rey is. And there is nothing. An endless expanse of nothing in every direction. 

She had expected to see the Masters, to be enveloped in Leia’s arms, in Luke’s. But there is no one and nothing. Not even herself.

Not even herself? Where is she?

There is no time here. There is nothing.

Then there is something. A pressure on her abdomen, or where her abdomen would be. And a tension. A dipole bond struck in the force. A dyad — one soul, two bodies. Her body, she can feel it. She feels her middle first, a hollow glow, then the glow spreads to her extremeties. She moves her hand atop his without thinking.  _Ben_.

At the first thought of him, she is back in her body, and the nothingness fades to light, and she is looking up at the rock ceiling but sees him in her periferals. She looks to him as quickly as she can and sits up even quicker.

“ _Ben?_ ”

* * *

He sighs in life-altering relief as she blinks up at him incredulously. Endless thoughts pass silently between the two of them, staring at each other like they’re each the first and last thing the other has ever and will ever see, before she speaks. 

“Ben?”

She takes his face in her hands. She can’t believe it. He’s real and he’s here and he’d brought her back. She can’t believe it.

He looks upon her in a way he never has before, raw and honestly and without shield or fear of judgment. He looks at her like he is perfectly content that she is the last thing he will ever see.

She kisses him.

His body reacts immediately and without premeditation, his arms flying out to wrap around her. He can’t believe it... he never thought he’d ever be worthy enough to deserve a kiss from Rey. Rey, who completely and utterly loathed him.

But this is not the kiss of a woman who loathes him.

Rey feels his surprise, his relief, as her lips press firmly against his. She never thought she would ever get to kiss Ben Solo, never thought she would ever get to hold him, to have him. And now he is here, and he is allowing her to.

They part, and the glow from their bond encompasses them. Ben, despite the innumerable amount of pain he feels, smiles for the first time since his youth, he thinks.

Rey can’t believe how beautiful it is, how lucky she is. She is going to kiss him again, she thinks.

And then he falls.

She falls with him. “No, no, no, no, no,” she murmurs. “Stay with me, Ben. Stay with me.”

Ben succumbs to his wounds. His eyes flutter shut.

Rey gives him a once over for the first time. She lays a hand over his chest and tunes herself in to the force to find his wounds. When she does, she feels them herself and winces. The burn hole in his abdomen has even opened back up and she realizes that he’d transfered his life force over to her in order to bring her back. He has several broken bones — she can’t know for sure if he’d landed at the bottom of the chasm or had used the force to guide himself to the wall of rock and gripped on, slamming himself into it.

His heartbeat is slowing. She lowers herself onto him, her ear to his heart, panicking. “ _No!!_ You cannot leave me!!” She looks up to the ceiling, directing her next words to the Masters, if they’re still there. “You _cannot_ have him!! I need him more than you do!”

His heart stutters once, twice, and then evens out very weakly and slowly, like an echo of a heartbeat. “ _Stay with me_ ,” she whispers to him. She lays a hand on his leg and attempts to heal it, but after only a few seconds her head becomes too light. At least one of them needs to be conscious if they both intend to survive this.

She looks up to the rock wall, past the wall, to Luke’s x-wing fighter. She’s still weak herself; she knows she can’t carry Ben’s body all the way. She closes her eyes. “Finn. Poe. Chewie. Someone.  _Hear _ _me._ ”

* * *

In the Falcon in the sky, Finn stops short in his tracks. “Rey!” he laughs. “She’s alive!”

Chewie bleats. 

Finn directs his next words to Lando. “Lando, we’ve gotta get down there. Rey needs our help.”

Lando immediately turns the ship around.

Finn leans forward against the co-pilot seat anxiously. ”We’re coming, Rey.”

* * *

Rey sits up and takes Ben’s hands in hers, sudden relief washing over her spirit. Someone had heard her. She’d felt it. Someone is coming. “Hold on, Ben,” she whispers. “Help is coming. Hold on.”

Within minutes, she hears the unmistakable purr of the Falcon’s engine lower itself onto Exogol, and minutes later an anxious Finn and Chewie are running through the slant opening and into Palpatine’s lair. Finn breathes a bit easier when he finally sees Rey and finds that she’d incurred no major injuries. Chewie bleats her name to announce their arrival.

Though first intending to stay with Ben, Rey can’t help herself when she sees the two of them. “ _Finn!_ ” she cries and goes to him. Of course Finn had heard her! _Of course,_ is all she can think, although she does not think of what this revelation truly means.

The friends embrace and Finn squeezes her tightly. “Thank God you’re okay.” He begins to lead her away. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Rey stops. “No, I need your help.” She swallows, knowing Finn will be apprehensive. “He helped me defeat Palpatine. I think I... I think I died. But Ben... he brought me back! And I can’t load him into Luke’s x-wing myself. I’m too weak.” She begins walking back to where Ben lies.

“Wait—“ Finn starts. For the first time he noticed Kylo Ren’s unresponsive form. “Ren’s  _alive!?_ ”

Rey has already taken hold of Ben and begun to lift him up. “Yes, but not for long if we don’t get him to a med bay, and quickly.”

Finn is utterly aghast. “You’re not _serious_ , Rey?! I’m not going anywhere near that... _thing!_ ” Because Finn does not see Kylo Ren as a man, but a wicked creature, a monster. He wants to add _“...unless it’s to blast him!”_ but thinks better of it.

Rey attempts to take all of Ben’s weight, but she stumbles. He is too heavy. She is too weak. “ _Please_ , Finn. He’s not what you think he is... He _saved_ me. He saved _all_ of us...” She feels her eyes well back up again with tears helplessly. “We need your help.”

Her usage of the pronoun  _we_ is not lost on Finn, and he realizes that something between Rey and Kylo has definitely changed, and whatever that change is, it is likely permanent. This angers him, not because he feels possession over Rey, but because _this is the man that has been hunting her relentlessly_. This is the man that murdered his own father. This is the man who’s performed countless acts of senseless genocide on multiple planets. He doesn’t deserve to live. Rather, he deserves to be left here to die in this Sith palace where the Sith will all died today, too.

Rey looks at Finn pleadingly, a tear or two falling at the realization that Finn could refuse and that she has no back-up plan. “Chewie?” she asks helplessly. 

Chewie is uneasy. Help the man who he watched kill his best friend? The man responsible for this entire senseless war? Not likely.

Rey stands her ground. “I won’t board without him,” she announces softly. She knows this is a horrible manipulative ultimatum, and she is worried if she has become a horrible manipulative person in the wake of losing someone she loves. “If you let him die, you let _me_ die.”

At this, Chewie comes to her aid immediately. “ _Chewie_... are you serious?!” Finn shouts in disbelief. “This is _completely_ insane!”

Chewie, still raw from Leia’s passing, reminds Finn of two things: who Ben’s mother is, and that both she and Rey’s wishes are more important than his and Finn’s hatred.

Finn sits on this for a moment before ultimately following behind Chewie with a reluctant sigh. 

With their help, Rey is able to transport Ben onto his father’s ship. She idly wonders how many years it has been since he’d last come aboard it. They lie Ben, still unconscious, down on a bench, and his long, large form overwhelms it. Chewie goes to the co-pilot’s seat as Jannah comes to their side, shocked to see Kylo Ren de-robed and de-helmeted. “Is this who I think it is?” she asks.

“Do we have anything we can patch his abdomen wound with?” Rey asks, all but ignoring Jannah’s initial question.

Although Jannah believes she has indeed just looked upon the Supreme Leader of the First Order, she also, amidst her shock, believes that she trusts Rey more than she fears him right now. As she begins to look around the ship’s various compartments and containers, Finn tries his hardest to meet Rey’s eyes, to silently ask her his most demanding question — is this Kylo Ren they are saving, or is this someone else?

Rey, however, keeps her eyes locked on Ben, her attention to his wounds, repeatedly checking and rechecking his pulse to make sure he is alive. Jannah returns with bacta spray and bandages and Rey is forced to break contact with Ben to let Jannah apply it, and Rey does finally look up at Finn, and he does not appreciate the favor she asks of him.

“I’ve got to get Luke’s x-wing out of here,” she says. “Will you watch over him for me?”

Jannah’s head pops up to take in Finn’s reaction, for she will follow his order, whatever that may be. Finn makes eye contact with her. Rey looks back and forth between the both of them. Finn begins to ask. “Rey—“

Rey silences him with another plea, and this time her voice breaks a little as she holds back a sob. “Finn. I promise, if you do this for me, consider it the last thing I will ever ask of you. _Please._ ”

Finn nods once, Rey’s words cutting him to his core and his adoration for her overtaking his animalistic desire to defeat his enemy while he lies undefended.

With a final sweep of Rey’s eyes over Ben, she brushes his hair out of his face, her palm lingering for a moment on his cheek, and murmuring something to him so softly that Finn can’t quite make out what she’s said, but it had been “Stay with me, Ben,” she turns to exit the Falcon. “I’ll explain everything later,” she promises Finn.

It is then when Finn realizes, with a putrid taste in his mouth that tastes like a kick to his gut, that the unfathomable has happened... that _Rey is in love with Kylo Ren._ Everything that Rey has been silently battling — her lineage, her pull to the dark, her incomplete jedi training — looks twisted and mutilated in this new light.

He wants to kill the man who lays before him. He has obviously manipulated Rey’s complicated feelings for him. He wants to kill him. He takes a step towards him.

Jannah speaks. “Finn, is this really... Are we to—“

Chewie, back at Finn’s side, stops Finn with a hand on his arm and Jannah with a sound from his mouth, again reminding Finn of Leia. This is Leia’s son. Leia gave her life to call out to him. She gave her life so that he might hear her call.

Finn marches angrily away and into a separate wing, while Jannah, feeling torn over Chewie’s revelation, watches as he leaves, unsure of whether to follow. She looks down at whom she now knows has just become the Resistance’s captive. She presses another bandage over Ben’s forearm.

* * *

In the x-wing, Rey follows the Falcon’s flight path toward the nearest planet of Endor. She desperately wants Ben to awaken so that she can confirm that he is going to be okay, but she silently pleads that he will remain unconscious until she is back by his side. She hopes and prays that Finn or Chewie or Lando would not behave untoward if he came to.  He is not who they think.  She hopes she had somehow communicated that, at the very least, by threatening to die at his side on the ground of her grandfather’s Sith palace.

On the planet’s surface, Rey exits the fighter hastily and commands the nearest Resistance worker to call for immediate medical attention to the Falcon. She stops in her tracks when she hears a voice call her name, softly in reality, but carrying to her through the force.

“ _Rey_.”

Rey’s eyes scan the field until they reach a pair of thickly framed ones. 

“Leia’s dying wish was for her son to  _live_ ,” Maz Kanata tells her.

Rey understands this to be a warning. 

Ben cannot be healed here. 

Ben will be killed here.

She looks past Maz and sees Finn and Poe rush to each other, embrace tightly, and share a kiss. She sees Chewie grab Rose and lift her into the air. She sees the Resistance and, consequently, her new family, cheer and congratulate each other and cry and hug and kiss. She should be down there with them, sandwiched between Poe and Finn and wrapped in Chewie’s furry arms and thanking Rose and Beaumont and Connix. To her weak and frenzied mind earlier on Exogol, bringing Ben to the nearest occupied planet was the only option. But Maz has just reminded her that she, the last jedi, has just personally escorted the Resistance’s number one enemy into their midst.

She’d made her choice when she’d rescued Ben. She sees that now. Her heart falls immediately, her lip quivering, and she cries yet again, for she cannot seem to stop. By saving Ben, she is giving up quite literally everyone and everything else that she has after, for so long, having no one at all.

She lets herself imagine, only for a moment, if she would have made the same decision to bring Ben along with her had she been in her right mind after he’d arisen her from the dead.

And her answer is this:  _undoubtedly._

No one truly knows him. But she does. He didn’t deserve to die there, just like she didn’t deserve to have to walk out of there without him.

Dragging her gaze back to Maz, she nods once in understanding. Chewie will be upset with her for what she is about to do, and she silently asks Maz to comfort him.

Rey’s attention is then drawn to a pair of twin sisters called Netta and Voletta who are running towards the Falcon carrying what little medical equipment they have afforded whomever awaits them inside. To them, it will be Kylo Ren, Commander of the Knights of Ren and Supreme Leader of the First Order.

Rey boards the Falcon and hurriedly starts up the converters. As the ship hovers above the ground, Rey makes eye contact with Finn one last time, calling to him through the force.

”Forgive me,” she says.

Finn breaks their gaze in resignation. He will not forgive her today. But she had been right — he doesn’t truly know her. Not in this way. He hopes spitefully that maybe Kylo Ren does.

But Finn loves her. He loves her enough to let her go.

So it is now that Rey does what she does best — leaves without explanation or goodbyes.


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey brings Ben to Tatooine to be healed by a nurse droid, now that I’m caught up on The Mandalorian and I know that nurse droids are canon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I struggled with this chapter quite a bit and rewrote it a couple of times. The struggle was that if the first chapter indeed was in the film, the most obvious place for it to go next would be a time jump to the ending scene on Tatooine with both Rey and a healed Ben burying the lightsabers. I intend to write that scene into my epilogue for this story. But I didn’t want to quit writing this, so here we go.

As Rey pilots the Millennium Falcon into the skies and away from her family, she wracks her brain for any known world where she could take Ben. She thinks maybe she could find sympathy from friends of Han, friends of Leia, but she worries she’s just left those people behind. She reaches into the Falcon’s databases to see where it’s been. Maybe one of these worlds will jog a memory.

“Hell-hello.”

Rey starts at the sound of the mechanical voice, believing she had been alone on the ship. She looks down to see Ochi’s droid, and she smiles in spite of herself. “Well, hello there.” She knows not how this little thing has ended up on the Falcon, but she cares little, just happy that he is here.

“You are my friend?” the droid asks.

“Yes,” Rey nods. “My name is Rey.”

“And I am D-O, D-O.”

“D-O? Is that your name?”

“Yes-yes.”

“D-O, do you think you could help me navigate this ship?”

“I will try.”

“Excellent.” Rey reaches down to touch D-O, pleased that he lets her this time. “We are carrying precious cargo.”

The droid wheels himself back and forth, excited. “Where are we-where are we going?”

Rey frowns. “I don’t know. I can’t think of a med bay in the galaxy who would treat Kylo Ren.”

“Who is Kylo Ren?” D-O asks.

And this small, unassuming question from a small, unassuming droid gives Rey the hope she’d needed to resume her mission. For there will be someone out there who will not recognize Ben, who will think he is just another man. “Never underestimate a droid,” Rey says to herself.

She punches in the coordinates for a place she was planning on visiting when the war was over, anyway.

* * *

Rey lands the Falcon in a sand field outside of town. She’d had her mind tuned in to Ben the whole flight, and he hadn’t yet woken. She goes to him and checks his pulse again even though she’d been listening to his heartbeat the entire time. He looks so peaceful lying here in his father’s ship. She can almost imagine that he is just asleep. She caresses his cheek, still in awe that he is here in the flesh and not just through their bond. “I’ll be right back,” she tells him.

D-O follows Rey out of the Falcon and stays right on her heels as they trek across the desert. “Where are we-where are we going?” the droid asks.

“We’re going to find the nearest town to ask for directions to a med bay.”

It’s the middle of the day on Tatooine, and Rey finds an outdoor marketplace with merchants and shoppers alike. Everyone who looks at her gives her a look as if she is not welcome here. _Outsider_ , they think.

She stops an older woman clothed in several layers of thick cloaks regardless of the particularly warm climate. “Hello,” Rey says to the woman. 

“Hello.” The woman is not particularly friendly to Rey; she continues about her business and Rey must make haste to keep up. 

“Is there a med bay nearby? I have a friend who is in need of immediate medical attention.”

The woman stops immediately and spins on her heels; D-O rolls into her and says, “Ow.”

The woman’s eyes are wide as she checks over hers and Rey’s shoulders to make sure no one is listening. “Are you with the Resistance?”

Typically, Rey has to think twice before answering this question, because depending on what world she’s on and who she’s speaking to, the real answer could be good or bad.

The woman sees Rey’s answer in her eyes and speaks again. “My husband is a retired pilot. He took his old ship out to a set of coordinates ex-General Lando Calrissian sent him... I warned him not to go... that it could be a trap...” The woman’s eyes begin to well up. Rey can sense her fear.

Rey begins to smile, eager to comfort her. “It was real,” Rey tells her with a nod of her head. “It was real. And we _won_.”

“Oh, my...” the woman can’t contain her laughter. She almost drops her bag of vegetables. “Isn’t that something!”

“The Sith have been eliminated,” Rey tells her excitedly, “and the First Order crumbled with no leadership. The galaxy is free again.”

The woman’s expression goes from one of joy to one of instant worry. “My husband. He hasn’t returned.” She looks at Rey as if Rey is her last hope. “Were you in the air?”

Rey’s face drops, unable to prove the pilot’s whereabouts. “I’m sorry; I was not. I was on the ground.”

“Right.” The woman notices Rey’s weapons for the first time and nods fervently. “I must go home and await his return.”

Rey is not sure if he will be returning, if he has not already, but she doesn’t say this. 

“I bought fresh turnips, you see,” the woman shows Rey her recent purchase. “He loves turnip soup. I must get the pot boiling so it’ll be ready when he returns.”

Rey can see it in the woman’s eyes that she knows her husband will not be returning, and Rey knows how imperative it is that she hurry and make this turnip soup. Rey lets her go along. As she does, a young boy approaches her, his eyes wide at the sight of her double-sided staff and the lightsaber clipped at her belt.

“There’s a-there’s a boy,” D-O warns excitedly.

The boy taps on Rey’s arm. “Excuse me,” he says confidently. His hair is dark and curly, and his olive skin is sprinkled with freckles. He can’t be more than seven or eight years old, yet he is at market presumably all alone. “Is that a real lightsaber?” he asks.

Rey impusively reaches to her side to place her hand atop Luke’s saber. “It is,” she says carefully.

“Are you a jedi knight?” he asks, eyes wide and brows raised high.

Rey can sense the awe and wonder the boy feels and she squats to his height. “I am,” she says with a wide smile. “How did you know?”

“I’ve seen one before,” he answers. “My mom knew a jedi once.”

Rey feels a sliver of hope. Maybe his mother will sympathize with her. “Do you live around here?”

The boy nods. “Just a few miles south.”

“I’m looking for a med bay to bring my injured friend to. He’s a jedi, too.” Rey knows that what she’s said is not exactly true, but not exactly untrue, either.

“Well, we have a nurse droid,” the boy tells her matter-of-factly. “You can bring the other jedi with you back to my place.”

A feeling of sudden relief washes over her. “Are you sure your mother won’t mind?” Rey asks, but the boy has already begun to walk in the direction of his home, and D-O has already begun to follow him.

* * *

“Mom, I’m home!” the boy announces as he, Rey, and D-O enter his home, a modest one made of sandstone.

“Terryn, is that you?” comes a woman’s voice from another room.

The boy, Terryn, drops his treasures from the market onto a table near the front door as Rey and D-O follow behind him. “Yes. I brought a jedi with me. I hope that’s okay.”

Terryn’s mother rounds the corner then. She is a tall woman with large curls in her thick, dark hair. “Honey, the jedi are ext—“ She stops, startled, when she sees Rey. 

“Mom, this is Rey and D-O.”

“Hell-hello,” D-O greets her.

The woman drops a rag towel on the arm of a chair and walks to Rey slowly, eyeing her clothing, eyes stopping at her saber. “That’s Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber.”

Rey squints at the woman. “You knew him?”

The woman nods. “Very briefly. After the rebels won the old war. He returned to his childhood home on the outskirts of town. I was just a girl.” She stares at the saber, lost in a memory.

“They’re here for Doc,” Terryn pipes up and then abruptly leaves the room.

The woman’s eyes reach Rey’s speculatively.

“My name is Rey,” Rey tells her, trying her hardest to make her voice sound soothing, convincing, for Rey desperately needs her help. “I was trained by Luke. I have his nephew here, back on my ship. He is hurt very badly.”

The woman doesn’t speak, she just continues to stare at Rey, her expression skeptic. Rey hears Terryn re-enter the room then, a hefty, lopsided metal droid at his side, all clicks and clacks.

“I am D0C-47,” the droid speaks, her voice nasally and brazen. “My masters call me Doc. I am learn-ed in the art of local medicine.”

D-O introduces himself pleasantly. “I am-I am D-O.”

“You say you have Luke’s nephew?” Terryn’s mother asks Rey.

Rey feels for the tension of their bond to make certain, and she finds it. “Yes.”

The woman nods once. “You may bring him here.”

* * *

The Millennium Falcon is empty.

Rey boards it quickly, her spirit filled with a regenerated hope, but she soon finds that she is alone in the room where she’d definitely left a sleeping man. “Ben?!”

Rey hurries through each wing of the ship in search of him. She can still feel him... he is close. She calls his name again and hears only the echo of her cry repeated back to her. She exits the ship and looks around, manic. How far could he have gotten with a broken leg? She shouts his name again into the air.

She hears his broken call in return, carried to her through the force. She follows it around the outside of the Falcon and there he is, half awake, sitting in the sand and leaning against the landing gear. “Ben, what were you thinking?” Rey rushes to him.

“What were  _you_ thinking,” he says to her pointedly, his voice small and quick and pained, “leaving the former Supreme Leader of the First Order unconscious and unprotected on perhaps the most recognizable and hated ship in the galaxy?”

When Ben had awoken, alone, he had recognized his father’s ship, of course — the ship that Han had paid more attention to than his troubled prepubescent son. He’d pulled himself off of the bench and hobbled in disgust down and out of the blasted freighter. He’d wished he’d been awake to ask of his captor to take a different ship; honestly  _any_ other ship at all would have been preferable.

But his captor is not a captor. It’s Rey. He can feel her past presence; she’d not long been gone.

He cannot wait for her in here, he knows. If someone were to curiously board — or recognize this as the smuggler Han Solo’s ship and  _angrily_ board — he is in no shape to defend himself.

But he didn’t get very far.

Rey admits silently that she hadn’t thought about someone recognizing the Falcon as she wraps an arm around Ben’s side and tries to lift him. “I’ve found a family who’ve agreed to host us while you heal. They’ve got a nurse droid. I need you to try to stand; I can’t lift you alone.” Ben stands, then, completely and uninhibited, without making a single noise of effort. Rey realizes he is using the force to lift himself for her; his life force must be renewing itself. They begin to walk very slowly to the speeder that Rey had “borrowed” from a neighbor. 

Rey can feel Ben’s annoyance as he looks around them at the vast amount of sand, sand as far as the eye can see. “Why would you bring me back to Jakku, of all places?”

“We’re not on Jakku.”

“Ah,” Ben says in understanding. “My fifth torture of the day.”

Rey counts the happenings in her mind. First would have been his falling into a chasm. Second, giving up his life force and falling unconscious. “Fifth?” she asks as they’ve reached the speeder.

“Third was when I woke up in the Falcon,” Ben says, confirming her thoughts. “Fourth was when I realized you weren’t with me.”

* * *

While the pair are technically welcomed back into Terryn’s home, it is with more distate than anything else.

“You’re Leia’s boy?” Terryn’s mother asks, distrust clear on her features.

She hadn’t mentioned to Rey that she’d known Leia. Rey feels Ben’s guard come up.

Hearing his mother’s name takes Ben aback, but he makes no changes physically.  _She says she knew Luke_ , Rey tells him telepathically. Instead of answering her, Ben reaches into his hostess’s mind without consent. “You’re Pasha Frenk.”

Pasha stares at Ben for a few moments, unblinking. Rey can feel the tension in the air and she isn’t sure quite what to do about it. She links her mind to Ben’s so that she can see any action he decides to make when he decides to make it and stop him if necessary. She has no idea if Pasha knows him to be Kylo Ren. She has no idea if he will be able to survive his wounds to another planet.

”I am D-O,” D-O adds.

Pasha finally looks at Rey, and Rey noticably stands up straighter, even with Ben leaning all of his weight on her. “Bring him along, then,” she says to Rey. “I’ve made up a bed for him.”

* * *

The room is simple, holding only a bed, a chair, and a small table. Rey helps Ben climb atop the bed. He makes a new face to match each new feeling of pain. His feet hang off the edge.

Doc is there, too, and she is mixing up a concoction atop the table. “I’m going to make a mist out of this and you’re going to breath it in. It will put you to sleep and I will then begin to cast what is surely your broken leg, and then I will assess any further wounds and come up with a treatment strategy.”

“I’ll stay awake,” Ben says. His mind is tired, so tired. But he can’t stand not being in control. “I’ve slept enough.”

“It was not an option,” Doc responds. “Your next of kin will make any decisions regarding your health on your behalf while you are asleep. If your next of kin is not present, you may assign yourself a caretaker from the people in this room. If you choose not to appoint a caretaker, I will appoint myself.”

Ben looks at Doc as if he would slash her into shards of metal if he were well.

“I’m his caretaker,” Rey says before Kylo Ren is reborn.

Doc sucks up the mixture from a tube in her wrist, and then her hand rearranges itself to become a mask. She presses a button on her forearm and the mask begins to mist. “Any advice for your caretaker before you go to sleep?” Doc asks.

Ben’s eyes pierce through Rey’s. “Be here when I wake up.”

“I will be,” Rey promises.

Doc presses the mask to Ben’s face.

He sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know not much happened in this chapter, and I was going to skip it entirely, but then I was proud of Ben’s dialogue because I could hear it in Adam’s voice. Next chapter will have some fluff, guaranteed.


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pasha gets a backstory. Terryn gets a backstory. Ben gets a bath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I know I said there’d be fluff this chapter but sometimes these things just write themselves and there’s... something else. Thanks for being here because I am having just the best time.

Once Doc begins preparing the cloth for Ben’s cast, Doc asks Rey to leave. “I will work faster without an audience.”

“I promised to be here when he wakes.”

“That won’t be for days, child.”

Days? What will she do here for _days_?

Rey hears the _tap-tap-tap_ ping of a child’s bare feet atop stone, and then Terryn appears. “Rey, my mother made soup. Come.” He takes her hand and Rey reluctantly allows him to lead her out of the room.

“Call me immediately if anything in his condition changes,” Rey warns Doc.

“It won’t.”

* * *

The kitchen is humble like the rest of the home, all beige and stone. Rey takes a seat at the table next to Terryn. Pasha is ladeling soup into two bowls, one for each of them. Rey takes hers gratefully and hungrily consumes spoonful after spoonful.

“Terryn, why don’t you go and eat yours in your room?” Pasha suggests to her son.

“Aw, really, Mom? I can?!” Terryn picks up his bowl and spoon excitedly and begins to skip to his room. D-O follows behind him, having taken a strong liking to the boy.

“Be careful not to spill!” Pasha calls out to him.

Rey takes a break from her soup to thank her hostess. “I really can’t thank you enough for letting us into your home,” she says. “You have been very kind.”

Pasha wastes no time with pleasantries. “I’m sure you’re wondering what I know.” She has no soup for herself; she holds a mug of tea in her hands.

Out of respect for Pasha’s words, Rey has paused her meal. And the answer is _of course_ she is wondering. But sometimes knowledge complicates things. She thinks back to a time when she didn’t know Ben Solo and only Kylo Ren. She didn’t know that he’d been neglected and had come to feel as though he ranked second in importance to his parents’ work. She didn’t know that Luke, contemplating murder, had made Ben’s mind up for him when Snoke hadn’t yet won. She didn’t know that Ben, torn in two and feeling as though he had nowhere to turn to, had given in to the dark side.

Yes, it sure was easier to fight for the light before she’d learned who Kylo Ren really was, easier to hate him before she believed that Ben was still alive.

Pasha takes a long sip of tea, holding it on her tongue for an extra moment before swallowing. “Eat, girl,” Pasha commands, and Rey does as she is told. “And I will tell you my story.

“When I was a girl, I was apprenticed to a star-charter named Illigan Oftan. I had a simple upbringing — my parents were moisture farmers much like Luke’s aunt and uncle. I had dreams of becoming a star-charter myself and moving off-world, somewhere where my work would be noticed, somewhere where I could make a difference.

“One summer, a Jedi Knight named Luke Skywalker showed back up at his childhood home. He’d come for Illigan. He was looking for something... a place that wasn’t on the official maps of the old Republic. He hired my master on recommendation as one who didn’t fear uncertainty, suggested to him by an old friend named Kenobi. It was my job to assist Luke that summer — I was seventeen, maybe older. He described to me, in detail, several worlds he had seen that weren’t on any map, and I charted them to the best of my ability around the worlds we knew. He’d hoped a more concise version of what he had in his head would make his search more productive.” Pasha pauses for a moment, looking down at her tea. She takes another sip, and when she speaks next, it seems as though she is speaking more to herself than to Rey. “I do often wonder if he ever found it.”

“I think he did,” Rey answers. She has almost finished her bowl of soup. “The first Jedi temple.”

Pasha’s intense eyes move back to Rey’s. “A world called Ahch-To.”

“That’s where I met him.”

Rey can feel that Pasha is relieved — happy, even! — but Pasha doesn’t show it outwardly. “When he arrived and we began to work together, he told me of his sister’s pregnancy. He confided in me about her vision that her son would be seduced by the dark side. He left when he got the news that she was in labor. I waited for him for many years. I became a moisture farmer like my parents. I had Terryn. I knew I couldn’t move off-world, not with the rising of the First Order regime. He never returned.”

Rey reaches out to place a hand atop Pasha’s, hoping it will comfort her and soften the blow of what Rey is about to tell her. “Master Luke has passed.”

Pasha pulls her hand back from Rey’s. “When you showed up here with him—” her eyes dart quickly in the direction of the room where Ben lies, “—I knew that they all must be dead. Luke, Leia. The boy’s father.”

Rey feels a jolt of pain herself at this. She retrieves her hand and looks down at her empty bowl.

“I am going to ask you something, girl,” Pasha says, her voice stern. “I will give you one chance to tell me the truth.”

Rey hears the urgency in Pasha’s words and meets her gaze.

“The man you have brought into my home, the one in the other room that my droid is nursing… Is he Kylo Ren?”

Rey’s heart stops beating. The room stills. All is silent. Her answer could quite literally determine the life or death of Ben Solo. But a jedi only tells the truth, so tell the truth, she does, in the most careful of words. “The man in the other room is Ben Solo, only son of General Leia Organa, former Princess of Alderaan, and Han Solo. He was trained in the jedi arts by his uncle, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. He killed Supreme Leader Snoke of the First Order. Together, we defeated the re-emerged Sith Lord Palpatine. He saved my life.”

Pasha looks directly into Rey’s eyes for a very, very, painstakingly long moment. Rey can’t breathe.

The sound of Terryn playing with wooden blocks in his bedroom flows into the kitchen. He has likely ignored his dinner altogether.

Pasha speaks. “You will stay here until Ben is healed. I will allow this in honor of Luke’s memory. When he is better, the two of you will leave this planet and never return.”

Rey takes a breath. After a moment of thought, she gives a slight nod of her head.

Pasha stands, pleased with the way the conversation has gone. She takes Rey’s empty bowl to the wash basin. Rey cannot stop herself when she opens her mouth to speak, the words coming into existence of their own accord: “Were you in love with him?”

Pasha, always contained, makes no apparent motion that the question had startled her except that the bowl falls from her hands and lands atop stone with a soft clang. She replies without looking over her shoulder. “Are you in love with his nephew?”

Rey’s entire face warms and she squirms in her seat, uncomfortable where she had once been content. She doesn’t afford Pasha an answer.

“Go and wash yourself,” Pasha instructs while she rinses out the bowl. “Leave your clothes outside the door and I will clean them for you.”

“I cannot ask that of you,” Rey says, shaking her head, shaking away the redness from her cheeks. “You’ve already done far too much.”

“You didn’t ask,” Pasha insists. “Go. You’re filthy.”

Rey is in no position to refuse Pasha of anything. So she does as she is told.

* * *

When Rey emerges from the washroom feeling renewed of body and spirit alike, she finds a set of robes the color of everything else in the home laid out for her. They hang off of her rather loosely, but she would not dare complain.

Night has fallen, and Rey realizes she was in the washroom for longer than she’d intended. But the water had felt so nice, and it had been many days. In fact, the last time she’d been cleaned had been by the raging waters of the Yavin moon.

The house is eerily silent save for the whirring of machinery that Rey assumes comes from Doc. She tiptoes into Ben’s room to find him still asleep, this time casted and bandaged. D-O has powered down on the floor beside the bed, charging himself. But Doc is not there.

Curious, she follows the low whirring sound to the room over. Terryn lays atop his mother’s bed, eyes closed and breathing deeply. Pasha sits at the end of the bed, holding Terryn’s hand in hers. Rey was correct, the sound _is_ coming from Doc. She has created another mist from her tubes and the mask of her hand covers Terryn’s face. Rey understands from the calmness of the scene that this is something that takes place often.

Rey makes a small noise to make herself known, and Pasha looks over to her. She stands and goes to the door, leading Rey outside of it.

“What is wrong with him?” 

Pasha leads Rey away from the room and out of Terryn’s earshot. “My boy’s lungs don’t work like they should. It is very dry where we live, and the air is filled with sand and dust particles and other debris. Whereas when our lungs inhale—” Pasha breathes in deeply, “—and exhale—“ she breathes out, “—they filter out toxins. Terryn’s do not. So every few weeks we give him a treatment that will help. They became very expensive, so we commissioned an old nurse droid and had her fixed up.”

“You didn’t mention he was sick,” is all Rey can think to say, for she is heartbroken for Terryn.

“You didn’t ask why I was in possession of a nurse droid.”

Pasha has lead the two of them to the main living area. “Here, I have laid out a cot for you. I have afforded you two blankets. It gets very cold in the nights.” 

Rey goes to the cot, warm with gratitude. She notices that her clothes have been hung to dry in the doorway. She turns to thank Pasha, but Pasha has gone back to her son.

* * *

The days pass slowly. Rey takes D-O with her to a junkyard and purchases some old metal parts. Terryn helps Pasha farm, and D-O helps Terryn when he can. Doc stays in Ben’s room, attentive and patient.

On the third day, Doc calls Rey into the room and requests help changing out Ben’s soiled clothing for clean robes. Embarrassed, Rey refuses. Doc insists that his wounds will heal faster when his body is rid of the dirt, that after the most recent diagnostic, she’d found that they are not healing as quickly as they could be. She asks if Rey would like for the role of caretaker to be vetoed over to herself. 

Rey agrees to help disrobe Ben.

Doc provides new robes for Ben. They are gray and almost the perfect size in width, although they are a little short in length. Rey realizes that Pasha is holding on to another story — the one of whom these robes belonged to.

Rey asks politely if Doc wouldn’t mind leaving the room. Doc says that she will fill an aluminum tub with warm water and return with a rag so that Ben can be wiped down.

She swallows once and rights herself. She must remind herself of three things:

Kylo Ren is dead. He cannot hurt her.

Ben Solo is asleep and unaware.

Their souls are quite literally bonded — the revelation of Ben’s physical body should pale in comparison.

So why is her heart beating so?

She feels incredibly untoward, as if she is to do something to Ben without his express permission. She reminds herself of a fourth thing — he’d left any medical desicions up to her, and this is merely a medical decision.

Rey thinks that she is incredibly fortunate that Pasha and Terryn have gone again to market.

Rey begins by wrapping her arms behind Ben’s shoulders and lifting so that he is sitting upright. She pulls up the pillow that his head had lay on so that it is behind his back now. She brushes his hair out of his face. His lips are parted slightly. She hopes he is dreaming of pleasant things... She touches his temple and closes her eyes. When she reaches into his mind she sees flashes of sunlight, grassy meadows, ripe fruit. These seem odd things for him to dreaming of, but she is glad that he is at peace.

Taking a seat in the chair beside the bed, Rey calls a sharp tool off of Doc’s table on the opposite end over to her through the force. She puts it through the hole in his black sweater that she’s made with Luke’s saber. She pulls it up to tear through the fabric as she doesn’t want to move any part of him and upset an injury. She is glad that his wounds are wrapped beneath his sweater. She knows that if she saw them she would feel guilty.

She removes the top and disgards it to the floor.

Rey has seen Kylo Ren’s bare chest before through their unexplained optical link, and it upsets her now just as it did then. He is so large, so wide, so pale. He has no business being this sculpted, this beautiful. This time, though, his chest is covered with purple and green bruising. She slowly places a shaking hand atop him. He is warm. She takes a cleansing breath and drags her fingers down his torso, around his navel, and back up. His skin is soft and smooth save for the rivets of old scars and the puckering skin of new ones. She rests her palm on his chest. She closes her eyes and feels his heart beating. She wills her own heartbeat to match his.

A dyad in the force. One soul, two bodies.

Peeling herself away from him, Rey goes to the foot of the bed and peels off his boots one at a time and then peels off each black sock that clings to his feet with sweat. She may see what Doc means now about Ben needing fresh clothing. She moves to his waist extra slowly. Her heart positively _pounds_ as she undoes his suspenders, and she is glad he is dreaming of other things. She unbuttons his trousers and lifts him up and off the bed with her mind as she slides the pants down his legs and off his ankles. Rey keeps her eyes on Ben’s face, refusing to look. When the trousers have hit the floor, she slowly lays Ben back down. She wipes the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, not because the action was particularly taxing, but because she can’t seem to get enough air into her lungs and she has begun to feel entirely too warm.

“Well, _that_ was dramatic.”

Rey jumps up and away from the bed at the sound of Doc’s voice. Doc enters, carrying a bucket of water and a rag. “I’d like to veto caregiver status over to you for just this task of washing him only,” Rey says a little too loudly.

Before Doc can answer, Rey leaves the room. She leaves the house. She leaves the yard. She stands alone in the sand and tries to meditate to calm herself.

How ridiculous she feels! She imagines herself as a jedi, capable of pushing her emotions to the side in order to perform. So often it is her feelings that rule her actions. Perhaps this is her greatest fault. 

Rey hears the soft crunching of sand beneath feet; Pasha and Terryn have returned from market. “Everything alright?” Pasha asks of Rey.

Rey opens her eyes. She will set herself to a task to rid herself of these silly feelings. “Do you know where I could obtain molding tools?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Pasha is Iranian-American actress Necar Zadegan.
> 
> Ben wakes up next chapter. Promise.


	4. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben wakes up! He and Rey Have A Conversation. The phrase “make love” is used. I use a line from Pride and Prejudice (2005).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised.

Ben wakes up first. Everything hurts. The surface he lies upon is somehow both too hard and too soft. He is warm and every inch of him feels clammy. He is breathing.

He opens his eyes second. He is on a bed in a room with walls made of sandstone. He is clad in gray robes. His abdomen is bandaged tightly. One of his legs is in some sort of casting mold, and one of his arms is wrapped to his side with a cloth. He is alive.

He wishes he were dead.

A girl is asleep in a chair by his bedside, her head tilted against one brushed-up shoulder. Her chestnut brown hair is tied up into three buns down the back of her head; loose strands of it fall around her freckle-sprinkled fair-skinned face. Her signature white clothing is fresh, but her gray boots have almost yellowed from the sand. A long staff leans against the chair; she has one hand loosely wrapped around it.

She is the most beautiful sight he has ever seen, and he is happy he is alive to see it.

Ben pulls at his end of their force bond, knowing it will wake her. “I see you respected my advice,” he says, and he hardly recognizes his own voice, deep and gravelly.

Rey jolts awake, staff in hand, facing the door, ready to defend Ben from whomever had just awoken her. She’s been like this for days, never truly at rest next to him.

Ben smirks at her reaction and calls to her again, this time through the force so as to not alert her further. Also because it hurts to speak.

Rey feels it then, the familiar tug on their bond. She turns slowly just in case it’s not real. She’s been dreaming of Ben waking up for several nights. If it’s all in her head, she doesn’t wish to disturb him.

Ben feels her disbelief and gives a slight smirk.

Rey’s eyes go wide and she drops the staff altogether. It hits the ground with a loud clang and she is at his side, seated delicately on the edge of the bed, taking both of his hands in hers. “Ben. You’re awake.” She feels as if she, too, is truly awake for the first time in days.

Ben winces as she jostles him atop the cheap mattress, winces as she takes his hand. “Where are we?” he asks. He watches as a desert scene comes to the forefront of Rey’s mind. She shows him Pasha and Terryn and Doc. “Right,” he says. Tatooine. Luke’s childhood home. This makes sense — where else would she think to bring him? “How long have I—”

Rey answers him before he finishes, for she’d heard his thought before he’d spoken it. “Four days.”

“Right,” he agrees. Rey had saved him. That’s not how it was supposed to go.

“How do you feel?” Rey asks, stroking his knuckles.

“Mm. Like I fell into a chasm and died.”

Rey’s eyes widen again. “Hold on, I’ll have Doc mix you something for the pain.”

Rey stands to go, but Ben grips her hands, not letting her. “Stay,” he pleads.

Rey complies. She knows she really should alert Doc that he’s awake, but she selfishly craves a few moments alone with him. The pair sit in amiable silence. Rey brushes some of Ben’s hair out of his face as she’s been prone to do these past few days, and Ben winces when her fingertips brush over a stitch in his brow.

“Do you not know the meaning of sacrifice?” he murmurs, thinking that if he were dead then he wouldn’t be in pain such was this. And then he remembers why he’s alive — Leia and _her_ sacrifice.

Rey feels a small drop of Ben’s spirit, a confusion she hasn’t felt within him since he was Kylo Ren. “What is it?”

He shows her an image of his mother from the last time he’d seen her. When he thinks of his mother, it hurts more than the physical pain. Rey feels it, too, and she tightens her grip on his hands. _“She did it for you,”_ Rey comments silently. Her first fear these four days has been that Ben would not wake up; her second was that Kylo Ren might wake up instead.

“I know,” says Ben.

“And we _won_ ,” she says aloud to remind herself that it was worth it. “Because of her. Because of _you_.”

“I seem to remember you defeating Palpatine yourself,” he says, his voice low. He feels a swell of guilt that he wasn’t there to help her and instead unconscious in the bottom of a chasm.

“I had some help.” At first Ben thinks she’s talking about him, but then Rey remembers each of the former Masters’ voices so that he can hear them, too. His lower lip trembles when he hears his mother’s voice, but he pulls it in quickly. And then he scoffs.

Rey pulls her brows together in question.

“Anakin,” Ben answers. “A little late to the party.”

“Perhaps his voice is not the one you needed to hear,” Rey suggests softly. Ben remembers the memory of Han, clear as day in front of him, atop the wreckage of the Death Star. Rey smiles a little when she sees Han in Ben’s head. And then she remembers the things she’d seen in Ben’s head before. “What were you dreaming of?” she asks.

His brows crease. “When?”

“When I was—” Rey begins, but she stops herself. “I reached into your mind. I saw sunlight... and grass...”

Ben remembers. “Here, let me show you.” He closes his eyes and recalls his dreams, brings them to the forefront of his mind to share them with Rey.

Rey sees a vision of Ben and herself. Ben is clothed in loose clothing the color of Tatooine. He sits in a grassy meadow, his long legs spread out before him. His feet are bare. She is seated next to him. Her hair is uncharacteristically down. She wears a sheer white dress that falls just to her knee. The sun is bright and warm; she can feel it on her skin. Atop the bed in Tatooine, Rey brings a hand to her arm, dragging her fingers up it lightly, feeling the warmth. In her mind, Ben feeds her a bite from a ripe pink fruit — she can taste it on her tongue, juicy and tart. Her physical self brings a finger up to her lips to try and catch the juice as it drips down her chin.

Rey blinks her eyes open and a single tear that she hadn’t known she’d produced falls down her cheek. “Where are we?” she asks. They were so at peace, so happy, so in love.

“Naboo,” Ben tells her. He collects her tear with his thumb. “My grandmother served two terms as queen there before she went on to serve as senator in the Old Republic.”

“Have you been there?”

“Once before.”

“Was it this beautiful?” Rey asks in wonder, holding on to the images.

“Even more. It would suit you well.” He is underexaggerating. Perhaps it’s the pain. He corrects himself. “ _You_ would suit _it_.”

Rey blooms at this. She has never experienced anything romantic, not among the Resistance, and certainly not on Jakku. She supposes some might see her force bond with Kylo Ren as romantic — being pursued across the galaxy, touching his hand across worlds, being offered his physical hand on multiple occasions, fighting alongside him to destroy evil. The feelings were there, very strong ones, but he was her enemy. She never dared to let herself daydream about being courted by the son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, because those chances balanced on a very delicate apex, and dreaming of it would only lead to pain when it inevitably didn’t come true.

And then the unthinkable happened, and it did.

Rey leans in to Ben, quickly at first, and then slowing to a stop and hovering just inches from his lips. Drawing in a shaky breath, she realizes that she is nervous. She finds this to be ridiculous and embarrassing — she has kissed him already once before! She has to remind herself that she had just defeated the Sith, that she had just been reborn, that she had been filled with adrenaline and had been awestruck when she’d kissed him then with such ease.

Ben hurts where Rey’s side presses into his torso, but he says nothing. Seeing her this close and knowing that it’s okay — it’s _more_ than okay; it’s _her_ doing — is enough to make his heart pick up speed. He worries not what that could mean for his recovery. His gaze drags across her eyes, down her nose, sits on her lips for a moment, and then pulls back up to her eyes. 

Rey stills as if she is waiting for permission.

To encourage her, Ben pushes another memory over to her mind, one of another dream, one she had not asked to see. Rey’s eyes darken as she takes in what he is showing her. It is a feeling, not an image. She closes her eyes and she can feel an imaginary finger drag over her chest, down her torso, around her navel, and back up.

Ben had felt it. He had been unconscious, but their bond is so strong that he’d felt it as she had touched him.

Ben brings his good hand up behind Rey’s head and pulls her to him, closing the gap.

This kiss is different. While their first had been full of relief, awe, and wonder, this one is more curious, more tempting. Rey takes his face in her hands, and she can’t believe that any of this is real, that he is alive and he is Ben and he is hers and they are safe and they are together.

Neither of them hear Doc come into the room.

“Physical activity is not recommended for a person in his condition,” the droid chastises.

Rey jumps away from Ben, again embarrassed, and Ben smirks at her again, amused. A strand of hair has fallen into her face and he strains to brush it away before she stands.

Doc moves to Ben’s leg to inspect it first as Rey moves back to her chair, and he remains still as Doc works her way up his body with her eye scanner, inspecting the rest of him.

“What’s the damage?” Ben asks.

“You need to rest. It will be approximately two months before you are fully healed. You may walk with a cane in a few days.” Doc stops and makes a few notes internally. When she speaks again, she directs it to Rey. “There will be plenty of time for love-making when he is well. Right now he needs to rest.”

Rey’s face turns red as a Sith saber and her mouth falls open. She begins to stutter. “I— I...”

Ben has to physically keep himself from laughing. “No more love-making,” he promises Doc. “Got it.”

“I’ll bring soup in an hour,” Doc continues. “If you don’t like soup, too bad, ‘cause it’s my master’s specialty. Get some rest.”

Rey sits back down in her chair when Doc leaves, still recovering from what had been said to her.

“Two months,” Ben says with a harrumph. “Two months inprisonment in sand jail for saving the entire observable galaxy.”

Collecting herself, Rey downcasts her gaze to her lap. “Pasha knows who you are,” she tells him. “She’s agreed to house us until you are healed.”

“And in return?” Ben asks, sensing there’s a _but_.

“ _We_ never return.”

“Ah,” he understands. This will prove itself a simple task for himself, but he knows it hurts her to think that she can never come back to her Master’s former home. He taps the bed where Rey had previously sat, cold now that she’d left. “I promise not to make love to you.” And then he adds in his head, _“Yet.”_

Rey squints at him but moves back to the bed anyway. “I should’ve left you on Exogol.”

Ben moves a hand to her knee. Now that she’s here occupying the same space as him in real time, atoms and cells and all, he needs to be touching her in some way at all times. To make sure it’s real. He looks up at her, at once serious. “Why didn’t you?”

This question colors Rey perplexed. “Don’t be daft.”

“I’m serious, Rey.” She still isn’t used to him saying her name so softly this way. “Why did you save me?”

Rey can’t believe he is truly asking this. _Why did she save him?_ Because there was never another option. “You would’ve done the same.”

“But there is nothing left for me. I left the First Order. My parents are gone. The war is over.” Ben knows that what he is about to say is going to hurt. But it can’t hurt worse than his body already does. “You can’t take me back there, Rey,” he explains. “The Resistance will never accept me. The droid said I can walk in a few days. You can leave me. You can return. You don’t have to feel guilty.” He sets her free.

“ _Guilty_!?” Rey interjects, but Ben continues.

“You brought me this far. You can tell them I didn’t make it. You can go back to your friends... the defected Stormtrooper, the short flamboyant one, the Wookiee, the droid, my mother’s followers. You can train a new generation of jedi. You can continue my uncle’s legacy. It’s what you should do. It’s what they would _want_ you to do.” 

Rey is silent. Why is it that no one ever asks what _she_ wants? Although, she thinks that Ben has just told her, in complicated words, what _he_ wants. She has never had an intimate romantic relationship before, so she can’t know for certain what it feels like to be let down softly. But she can assume that this is what is happening now. She feels her eyes prickling with threatening tears, but she will not let him see them. “You want me to go.”

And here it comes. The pain. His gut twists and his heart drops and he was wrong — it _does_ hurt as badly as his physical injuries. “A life with me will be one of running and hiding. I’m probably the most wanted person in the galaxy right now. You will never be able to go back to your friends. It would be selfish of me to assume you’ll stay.”

“I can’t _believe_ you’re _worried_ about seeming _selfish!_ ” Rey cries. “ _You!_ Kylo _Ren!_ Worried about being _too selfish!_ ”

Ben implores her to lower her voice. “Your guilt doesn’t have to keep you here,” he says softly. “You’ve repaid me enough already.”

Rey does _not_ lower her voice, actually. Because she is furious at what Ben is implying. “When I died, did you gift me with your life force out of _guilt_?! Did you save me because it was what a _jedi_ would do? Is _that_ what it was?!”

Ben looks down in shame. He hadn’t meant to anger her. “You know why I did it.”

Rey feels manic. She knows the words he is speaking are logical, sensical. But she never thought she’d hear them. She’d thought — naively, now, she sees — that he’d be ecstatic that she’d chosen him. “Maybe I _don’t_ know, Ben!” she shouts, and the tears fall from her eyes despite her better efforts. “Why don’t you tell me!? Why don’t you tell me why you _saved_ me!?”

Ben lifts a hand and uses the force to draw Rey to him with a curl of his fingers. She lands on his torso and he audibly grunts at the pain. He takes Rey’s face in his hand and wipes at her tears with his thumb again. “Please don’t shout. I wanted to die, Rey. I wanted to die for you. So that you wouldn’t have to make this choice. So that you could _live_.”

Rey sniffles and sobs, her eyes darting back and forth between each of his. “I’d rather be dead than live in a world where you don’t exist.”

This utterance fills Ben with immense relief, and he sighs. How is it possible he could he have come out of this the true winner? _How?_ “So a life with me is what you desire, then?” he confirms.

Yes, _of course_ it’s what she wants! How can he not see? “When I took your hand, Ben, on Exogol, I did not do so lightly.”

Ben swallows down his insecurities. “Then here is what I want,” he begins, and Rey thinks she has never heard his voice this deep or this dark. “I want for you to submit to me. All of you. And I will give you... _everything_. I wish to never part from you... not this day, or the next, or the next.”

Rey’s heart has been running on fumes for as long as she can remember. It grew to learn fullness, as a child, happiness, and then her parents brought her to Jakku and sold her and she was alone and empty. When she met Finn and then Han and Chewie and Leia and Poe and Master Luke, it was filled nearly to the top. And then she’d lost half of them. And when she’d fatefully bonded with Kylo Ren and, thus, felt his pain, his fear, his suffering, his torture, his uncertainty, his ties to the light, she’d let herself think, if only for a second, of him returning to the light, and then it would be like her having a piece of Luke and Han and Leia back. But as he kept pursuing her, as he’d continually asked her to join him in the dark, she’d brushed off the feeling as quickly as it’d come, believing him to be too far gone. And now he is here, and she is in his arms, and he has just spoken the most beautiful words from his mouth, words she thought she would never hear, words she thought she would never get the chance to respond to. 

All she’d ever wanted was to belong. All she’d ever wanted was to know her place. All she’d ever wanted was for someone to come back for her.

And as she takes his face in her hands, this is her response: “I vow to you, Ben Solo, that I will never again leave your s—“ 

Rey’s words are cut off by Ben’s kiss, hot and open-mouthed and hungry. She responds in earnest, kissing him back in a way that makes him wish desperately that he was already healed so that he could feel more of her touch on his skin.

Rey feels his thoughts in her mind as if they are her own, and they might as well be, for how fiercely she finds herself yearning for him. She hears a noise escape him, a low rumbling in his chest, and it ignites her. It hurts to move, but Ben can pull her closer with the force. He uses what strength he has to sit up as much as he can. Rey rakes her fingers through his hair and succumbs to his pull so that they are chest to chest. She wraps her arms around his neck, and he her waist. They tell each other all the things they haven’t said — the apologies, the forgivings, the declarations — silently and through a series of kisses so transparent that could only be from two souls acting as one, a bonded pair.

Rey parts from him, presses her forehead to his, and takes a ragged breath. She thinks that if this is any preface of what the rest of her days hold, then she will be content like she was in his dream.

Ben clutches on to her for dear life, and he can feel his strength waning. Rey senses it. “You must rest,” she tells him.

“I’m so tired of sleeping. I’ll stay awake for a while longer.” With too many endorphins swimming in his head to register further pain, Ben slides back down onto his terribly uncomfortable bed and shuts his eyes. “You should rest, too,” he says after a moment. “I expect when my strength returns to me, you’ll want me to make love to you.”

Rey starts. “Ben Solo!” she chastises him. She looks to the door, hoping no one had heard, but she cannot hide the rising rouge in her cheeks. When she looks back to him, his eyes are not opened, but a smirk plays at his lips. “I’m serious, Jedi Knight Rey,” he says. “We’re a dyad. Therefore, I expect we’ll be fairly good at it.”


	5. 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our protagonists Have Another Conversation. Ben cries because Adam would want him to. And then there’s a scene just a normal scene!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)

On an unimportant night in Tatooine, after Rey and Ben consume five helpings of soup between the two of them, after the second sun has set over the home, after Doc has changed Ben’s bandages and Rey has assisted Pasha in washing the dishes, after Terryn and D-O have showcased their most recent artistic creation of a castle made from blocks, wires, and stones, Rey settles in to her cot, exhausted.

She lays still for longer than she knows, staring up at the ceiling. Her mind wanders back to her friends. She hopes they are well. Finn will have told Poe and Chewie of what he most assuredly will have deemed as her betrayal by now. He will tell them that she chose to save Kylo Ren and left with him in the Falcon instead of giving him over to the Resistance to be held accountable for his crimes. He will tell them that she should now be deemed as a threat to the Resistance, as she has surely been manipulated by the dark side. Poe will say he cannot believe that. Chewie will say that he saw Rey on Exogol, and she seemed the same as always, that she was not in the Dark. Maz will say that the man Rey escaped with was not Kylo Ren. Maz will say that it was Leia’s dying wish for her son to live. Won’t she?

Rey wonders how long it will be before she can go back to them. In a few years, she will go back alone. She will explain that Kylo Ren is dead, that Leia gave her life to save Ben, and that Ben gave his life to save herself. That she could not, in good conscience, leave Ben to die. That she left with him because she knew he would be punished by the Resistance. That he is not who they think he is. That she loves them and misses them dearly and desires nothing less than to be with them, but if they cannot accept him, she will not return.

They will ask why she let him live. She will say because it was the right thing to do. A jedi does not murder.

They will ask why she stayed with him. She will say because he is a piece of Leia, a piece of Han, a piece of Luke.

They will say no, it is more than that.

She will say they are bonded. She will say, _“You couldn’t possibly understand.”_

Finn will not like that.

Her beloved Finn had revealed himself to be force-sensitive during the battle on Exogol... This is fantastic information Rey hasn’t really been able to process yet. So couldn’t Rey just ask Leia to show herself to Finn? Couldn’t she ask Leia to explain all of this to him for her? So that maybe when Rey returns, it won’t have to be alone?

Luke and Leia have been awfully quiet since Exogol.

Ben, feeling how unsettled her mind is, calls to her through the force. _“Rey. Come to me.”_

Rey stands from her cot, tightening her robe around herself and tiptoeing quietly to Ben’s room. He is sitting up and awake. He says nothing. Rey goes to him. She, too, says nothing. Ben reaches into her mind to see what is troubling her. She blocks him. She doesn’t want him to feel guilty. He pushes harder. So does she.

“When are we going to learn to trust each other?” Ben says, his voice soft and low, as he looks into her eyes.

Rey kisses him.

Ben knows she is doing this to distract him. He knows but he cannot stop himself from reciprocating. Doc had given him something for the pain after dinner. It had sent him right to sleep, but Rey’s anxious spirit had coaxed him awake. Now, he muses, he ought to be able to reap its benefits. He wraps his arms around Rey’s hips and pulls her onto his thighs. Rey clings to him tightly, glad for the closeness, glad for the warmth, glad for the feeling of desperation, glad for something to distract her mind. She pulls herself further up into his lap. He moans.

_“Open your mouth,”_ Ben commands telepathically, and Rey complies. She inhales sharply when she feels his tongue on hers. She copies his movements with her own. She didn’t know that she could ever be kissed this way.

Ben touches her in every place that he can reach with one good arm and one broken one — her back, her shoulders, her arms, her waist, her hips. Rey keeps her hands in his hair. She’ll never admit it, but his hair is her favorite feature of his and she’d be properly upset if he were to ever cut it.

Curious, Rey reaches into his mind. The images she finds are downright filthy and she makes a noise of shock against his lips. Ben pulls on her hair, pulls her face back and away from him. “Stay _out_ of my _head_ ,” he growls, low and full of lust. As payback, or at least that is how _he_ sees it, Ben presses his face into the groove where her neck meets her shoulder and kisses her there, open-mouthed and _hard_. Rey gasps at the feeling and extends her neck out so that he can kiss his way up to her jaw.

Rey breathes quick and shallow breaths as she lets Ben kiss where he pleases. He moves down her neck once more and slides her robe over to expose her shoulder. He bites her lightly and she squeals a bit. He quiets her by bringing his mouth back to hers.

Rey moves her hands to Ben’s neck. She slides them beneath his robe and over his shoulders, down his chest. She touches him as she had before when he’d been unconscious. His thoughts run terrifically wild. Again copying him, she moves her mouth to his jaw. Ben’s entire body tenses up as she brushes her lips from his jaw to his chest and back up. She loves the scent of his skin. She wonders if he will like the scent of hers.

Rey pulls back and looks at him. His eyes are wild, his hair disheveled, his robe hanging off one shoulder. She thinks he has never looked more attractive than he does right now.

Ben, muscles stiffened still with the anxiety of what Rey will do next, watches as she slowly, so _terribly_ slowly, brings her hands up to the tie of her robe. She pulls on the fabric until it comes undone. She gently slides the robe off of her shoulders. Beneath it, she is bare. The robe pools around her legs.

Ben thinks he might die. He reaches up with the hand of his unbroken arm and touches her shoulder, her neck, her arm. He wants to touch her everywhere that she will let him.

Rey watches him take her in. She watches as his eyes move down her torso and back up and then down again, straining to see her in the sparse moonlight let in from the window above the kitchen sink. No one as ever looked at her this way, like she is the first angel they have ever seen, and it delights her. When he begins to touch her, she closes her eyes. A small grin pulls at her lips.

“What are you so happy about, Rey the scavenger from Jakku?”

To get back at him, or at least that’s how _she_ sees it, she uses the force to undo his robe. He smirks and lifts his arm up so she can pull the robe off of him. She discards both robes to the floor with one small motion of her fingers. Ben wraps his arm around her back and Rey kisses him hungrily, uninhibited, like a desert scavenger. The feeling of skin against skin feels like nothing she has ever felt before. She can’t seem to get close enough. She can’t imagine how it will feel to be completely bare, completely his.

_”I want you. Now,”_ Ben commands silently. 

A shiver crawls up Rey’s spine. ”Doc advised against it,” she says aloud.

”That droid is a repurposed pile of scraps.”

”Careful. She’ll hear you,” Rey warns, but she herself does not behave very carefully. She kisses his cheeks, his ears, his neck, anywhere she can find a place unkissed, anywhere she can bring forth a noise from him to her ultimate pleasure.

Rey is the greatest delicacy Ben has ever tasted. Every inch of her is smooth and soft and unbelievably perfect. He cannot wait another day, another hour, another moment. He _must_ have her.

”Rey,” Ben says, his voice positively raw, “If you do not mean to let me have you within the next few moments, clumsily and bandaged and currently out-of-practice, I advise you to stop what you’re doing.”

Ben grimaces as Rey pulls away from him, for he knows that he has spoken wrongly. He keeps his eyes closed for a moment, hoping she will let it go and not ask questions.

“Out of practice?”

Rey is hurt. She feels a stabbing pain in her gut, sharp and pointed. She’d never before entertained this possibility — the possibility that Kylo Ren had had a woman before. Of course, she never thought they would ever get to a point where it mattered, to a point where she’d have to make it known to him, in no uncertain terms, that she has never been with a man. “Who was she?”

“Rey...” he says softly, pleading. He brushes his knuckles over her cheek. “Let’s not do this right now.”

Rey doesn’t push him away, but she is firm. “Tell me.”

Ben sighs. He knows she will not let this go. He calls her robe up off the floor. He wraps it around her shoulders. “Her name was Cerena,” he begins. “She was my servant; she was indentured to me. It was about eight or nine years ago. Servants were common in the First Order. Most young men had them. The servants were to do anything we commanded.”

“You _forced_ her?!” Rey whispers harshly.

“No. But I heard stories... among the other men. It was common. But I didn’t feel the need for a personal servant... I saw _everyone_ as my servant. No one denied me anything. All were terrified of me, of my power. Except Cera. She was fascinated by the force. Said she became a servant specifically to be sold to me so that she could learn. I told her force-sensitivity is not something you can learn — it’s in your blood. She followed me around for a year; Snoke insisted. He thought it a challenge in my training. See if I could keep a pet.”

Ben doesn’t flinch at all when he speaks of his past, doesn’t stutter at all when he speaks of Snoke. He does not fear his past; he is not ashamed of what he was. It is just a fact. It is just something that happened, something that was but isn’t anymore.

“I found menial tasks for her to perform. I sent her on made-up missions. She never learned to use the force. But she did tell me, one day, that she had fallen in love with me... which I thought to be absurd. I’d been nothing but cruel to her. She told me that she meant to give herself to me. And that’s when I realized what Snoke’s test really was. He wanted me to prove that I could indulge in the frivolities of a normal man and not let romantic entanglements get in the way of my training.”

“So you went to bed with her,” Rey guesses.

“Romance, women, love... these were not things I ever saw for myself. Above all else, I craved _power_ ,” he says, and Rey can feel the greed from within him as he recalls his former driving force. “There was no real emotion in it — not for me. I was performing a task, training. That was all.”

Rey feels sad for her. “That poor girl.”

Ben can’t believe this. He’s just admitted to Rey to having sex for sport, and she’s sympathizing with the woman?! Perhaps Rey will never cease to surprise him. Perhaps he hopes she never does. “She knew exactly what she was getting herself into,” he says. “I don’t believe she ever really loved me. She was doing what she was told to do by Snoke in hopes that he would teach her to use the force. Everyone in the First Order had an agenda. Nobody was there for the comraderie.”

“I know,” Rey says. “That’s why I pity her.” She swallows, nervous to know. “What happened?”

“I let it go on for a few months. After I’d believed I had proven myself, I set her free. I didn’t think about the potential consequences. Where I saw freeing her from her contract as no longer needing her help, her master, the one who sold her to me, saw it as if she had done something not to my liking which had lead to her dismissal. He believed that no one else would want her if they thought she had displeased me.”

“He killed her,” Rey guesses, her heart dropping even further.

Ben shakes his head. “Masters like that, they like to keep their hands clean so First Order fathers will give them their daughters. But _someone_ killed her, yes. Upon his orders.”

“How awful,” Rey says.

“Rey.” Ben swallows, an ache within him that had not previously been there. The tone of his words changes altogether into something quite serious. “I never thought... I never thought I was capable of anything but fear, hatred, greed. I thought that was my destiny. And then you... You _saved_ me, Rey. Not Leia, not Han. _You_.”

“Ben...”

“With her, I felt nothing,” Ben insists, although Rey would not ask it of him. “With you,” His voice shakes but he can’t stop it. “With you, I feel it all... I feel _everything_.

His lip quivers, and Rey can see the shine of tears in his eyes. She reaches for him. “You’re trembling...”

“I tortured you, Rey. I stalked you across galaxies, chasing my obsession, chasing that possibility that there was someone else that I could share my empire with, that I didn’t have to be alone. I _tormented_ you.”

“That wasn’t you! That wasn’t you, that was—”

“It _was_ me,” Ben cuts her off sharply. “I can’t be two people. I am who I was, and I am who I am now. Just because I’ve killed his desires doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for his actions. I am Kylo Ren. I will _always_ be Kylo Ren.”

Rey understands. She understands that he must take responsibility for what he’s done in order to reconcile that part of him. She just can’t stand seeing him in this pain.

Ben says something else that he feels to be far more painful. “How can you ever forgive me, Rey?”

This positively splits Rey in two. _How can he not see?!_ She takes his face in her hands. “Can you not see... can you not _feel_... the depth... and the _breadth_... of what I feel for you?”

No, she will never cease to surprise him.

He kisses her, then, a kiss of pure longing that lasts forever. Rey can taste his salt tears.

Finally, when Rey pulls herself from him, he expects they will lay down and perhaps get some rest. Ben thinks she will embrace him as she leans in. She moves her mouth to his ear.

“I want you to show me what you did to her.”

Ben’s heart stops.

Rey moves to the opposite ear. “I want you to show me what you did to her, and not hold anything back. Not a kiss,” she kisses his jaw, “or a _touch_ ,” she runs her fingers down his torso, “or a _word_ —“ she rocks against him, producing a grunt from him, “any less.”

Ben swallows and nods, dumbfounded and speechless.

Rey kisses him, and Ben kisses her back, and Rey takes her robe off once more, and Ben grabs her hips and rocks her against him again. With every moment of friction, his mind flashes white-red... like a very hot star. Or perhaps like his saber.

Rey reaches for the draw-string at his waist.

Ben, inhaling sharply, almost animal-like, lifts Rey with the force, hovering her just above him. She yips when he does, for she hadn’t seen this decision in his mind. He rolls to his side, his good arm and broken leg both pressed into the mattress. He barely registers the pain. He lets Rey go beside him.

Rey anxiously grabs at him the moment her side drops into the mattress, and he to her. She aids him in pulling himself over and onto her despite his use of only one arm and one leg. Rey breathes very heavily as he takes his mouth to her neck again and then, slowly, moves his kiss down her chest, then her torso. She grabs at his back and shoulders and attempts to pull him closer, happy to have him crush her.

Ben moves his hand to the draw-string at her waist.

* * *

“Rey.” He murmurs when the first sun is just coming up.

She lays on her stomach, her back bare. Her face is pressed into his arm. “Mm?”

Ben drags lazy fingers across her back. “I didn’t kill _all_ of his desires, Rey.”

“I know,” she says and drifts off into her most peaceful sleep in over a year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never bought into the Kylo Ren Is A Virgin theory. The most powerful man in the galaxy who can do anything he wants? Who serves an evil overlord? Who is thirty when we meet him? Didn’t make sense to me. But I know the Other Route fic-writers take is that he “hired” (had at his disposal) sex workers. So I wrote somewhere between the two. I have spoken.


	6. 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey finishes her saber, Ben heals, and we say goodbye to the Frenks. An idea is planted on how they will move forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lmao I never finished this fic because it made me sad to think of writing the ending and then that’s it, Ben’s really dead. I’ve had time to get over that and I remembered about this story and that I didn’t finish it so here I am.
> 
> If I were truly editing the movie and not just writing a fix-it fic, I would have included the entirety of chapter 1 in the movie and then skipped forward to the very last scene of this chapter.

Rey wakes first. The sun is high in the sky and the room is warm. She opens her eyes slowly. She doesn’t recognize the position she’s lying in, the direction she’s facing, the stone wall she’s looking at. She’s in her robe. A strong, pale arm wraps around her protectively.

She rolls over and comes face to face with the owner of the arm. His lips are parted slightly. He breathes evenly, snoring softly, still asleep. His black hair is quite disheveled. His torso is bare.

Heaven. She’s in heaven.

Rey plants a kiss atop his nose. 

Ben blinks awake slowly, finding himself directly face to face with Rey. Her brown eyes are lazy, her three signature buns have morphed into something else entirely. Her robe is wrapped loosely around her soft skin. She is angelic.

Heaven. He’s in heaven.

“Good morning,” he croaks.

“Good morning.” Her voice is more musical than his. “I’ve never woken up next to anyone before.” She says this knowing she might be alone in it.

But she’s not. “Me neither,” Ben answers with a smirk and pulls her closer. A wide grin takes over Rey’s face. “How do you feel?” Ben asks, although he is tuned into her and she is warm and glowing.

“Perfect,” she answers.

The pair of lovers share a brief moment’s bliss before being interrupted by a young voice’s exclamation. “ _Finally!_ ”

Rey and Ben both turn to the voice in the doorway. Terryn and D-O have just arrived, the former looking fully exasperated. “It’s nearly lunchtime!” Terryn scolds. He faces the hallway. “ _They’re awake!_ ” he announces to the rest of the household.

Rey sits up automatically. She pulls her robe tight. She looks at Ben and laughs softly at their strange situation.

“Well, that was nice while it lasted,” he says. He fingers the hem of her robe. 

“I’ll fetch you some breakfast.”

Ben holds the hem in his fist when she goes to move, stopping her. “Wait,” he says.

Rey smiles again, turning to him while he pulls at her robe. They look at each other, sharing a moment of communication that no one else can hear. She touches his face, an action of reassurance. He nods, allowing her to go.

Doc comes in to check Ben’s wounds. “Thank my master for letting you sleep in,” she chastises. “I would’ve opted to wake you up. When the sun comes up the work day starts. That’s the motto here. But she said something about the two of you having a restless night.” Ben smirks at this, thankful that Rey has left the room, for she surely would have become embarrassed by it. Doc cleans and redresses Ben’s bandages as needed. “I’d say you ought to try to walk with a cane today,” she tells him. She directs her next words to Terryn. “Boy, did you ever find him a walking stick?”

D-O had followed Rey into the kitchen like a very good boy, but Terryn hasn’t left the doorway. He nods, but he says nothing. He just stares.

Ben curses as Doc gingerly lifts his broken arm just the tiniest inch —  _ow_ — and swipes at his underarm with a disinfectant cloth. “ _Kriff_ ing hell.”

Terryn repeats him.

“Don’t let your mother hear you say that,” Doc warns.

* * *

In the kitchen, Rey warms water and fills two mugs. She adds loose tea leaves from a jar near the wash basin and begins to stir them. Pasha comes in from outside and offers two rolls of warm bread and a plate of fresh cream. Rey thanks her.

“Doc said he can probably walk with a cane today,” Pasha says.

Rey smiles. “That’ll be good. He can get some sunlight. He’s been feeling kind of restless.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Rey looks at Pasha, almost certain that she’d heard a mocking inflection in her words, but not certain enough to accuse her. Pasha’s eyes flicker uncharacteristically deviantly. Rey gives her a frown before leaving.

Back in Ben’s room, Doc has come and gone for the time being, but Terryn still stands in the doorway. Rey excuses herself as she slides through. Ben’s features — clearly showing annoyance — soften when he sees her. He is sitting up in bed and donning fresh robes.

“What is he doing?” Ben asks. 

Rey sets the mugs of tea on the table and hands him a roll. She spreads some cream on it with a wooden utencil. “Who?”

“The kid.” Ben takes a bite. He’d tried everything in his wheelhouse to get the kid to react earlier aside from pulling a weapon on him or threatening his mother’s life, but he’d produced nothing from the peculiar boy.

“Terryn?” Rey turns to look at the child in the doorway as she takes a bite for herself. Sweet Terryn who stifles a secret longing for adventure and helps out anyone he can whenever he can with whatever he can.

Terryn says nothing.

“See?” Ben says. “He was there when we woke up. He’s just been standing there all morning, just staring. He won’t speak to me when addressed. I don’t know how long he was watching us sleep for.”

Rey tries to appease him, although she’s not terribly concerned with much of anything other than her roll at the moment. “Terryn, is everything all right?”

Terryn nods.

“Why are you standing in the doorway? Do you want to come in?”

Terryn shakes his head.

“You  _don’t_ want to come in, then?”

“My mother says I can’t talk to him,” Terryn finally speaks.

“Ben?” Rey asks while pointing to him.

Ben scoffs. Terryn nods.

“Why not?” Ben asks between bites.

Terryn looks to Rey for help.

“Why can’t you talk to him?” Rey asks.

“Because my mother says he’s a bad guy.”

Ben chuckles. Rey smirks.

“Well  _are_ you?” Terryn asks of Ben, and then, remembering himself, directs his next words back to Rey. “Well, is he?”

Rey finishes off the last of her roll and reaches for her mug. It is warm in her hands and she is amused and perfectly pleased with the day so far. She looks to Ben, a devilish grin on her face. “Well,  _are_ you?”

Ben clears his throat and looks at Terryn pointedly. He’s probably not the good guy. But he’s not the bad guy, either. Not any more. Rey would not have allowed the bad guy to live, to win. “Don’t they say the good guy always wins?”

“You look pretty messed up to me,” Terryn quips back quickly.

Rey lifts her brows at the exchange and can’t help but to laugh. It is a delightful sound.

“You should see the other guy,” Ben says with a pout. He’s never liked being laughed at. He gets that from his father.

“Are we going to keep working on your sword today, Rey?” Terryn asks, at once retiring the present topic.

“Sword?”

Rey turns to appease Ben’s curiosity. Her cheeks redden in shame, as though she has just been caught. “I’ve been working on something.”

She doesn’t miss the flicker of excitement in his eyes. “A saber?”

Rey nods once. “While I was training with Leia, I ventured off for a couple of days and found a kyber crystal. I haven’t yet felt worthy enough of wielding it. But I think it’s time for the Skywalkers’ sabers to retire.” She has a thought, then, and she realizes she’d been acting selfishly. For they are not hers to retire. “Unless...” she looks away from him shyly.

Ben infers her meaning, and he is hit with a sudden mixture of feelings — guilt, shame, anger. Feelings he does not wish to sit in right now, not after such a perfect night. “No, I don’t think I’ll wield one again,” he admits, his voice low and quick. He isn’t worthy of such power, not after all the years he’d spent using it for harm, to bring about pain and suffering. He doesn’t like to dwell on it. Remembering the past won’t change it.

Rey’s brows furrow together. “Ever?” She gives a slight shake of her head. He’s the best swordman she’s ever seen, second only to... “But you’re—“

He stops her mid-sentence, for he knows what she’s to say. “I’m not.” He searches her eyes, tries to find what he knows is there. “ _You_ are.”

“The last Jedi?”

The pair, both having momentarily forgotten about the third party in the room, move their eyes to look upon him.

Terryn simply shrugs. “That’s what I heard Mummy say. She said  _you’re_ —“ he points at Rey, “—The last of the Jedi, and  _you’re_ —“ he jabs a finger at Ben, “—the Supreme Leader of the Fur Storer.”

Ben manages a short chuckle at this, but Rey can feel how torn he feels inside. “There is no more Fur Storer,” Ben tells the boy. “You don’t need to worry about them any more.”

Terryn’s features turn smug. “I knew you weren’t really a bad guy,” he announces proudly. “I told Mummy!— I told her, ‘Rey is smart. And Rey is kind. And Rey wouldn’t love someone who was really the bad guy.’”

Rey chokes a bit on her tea at his proclamation. Have her feelings been so utterly transparent? Ben chuckles again; a real one, this time. “No, I suppose she wouldn’t.”

To this day, neither of them will concede on their own points to this argument:

Rey — that Kylo Ren was never fully in the dark;

and Ben — that Rey cared for him even when he was.

* * *

The days pass, and Ben gets stronger on his cane until the days turn to weeks and he doesn’t need it any longer. Doc fusses over Ben to which Ben is greatly annoyed and Rey continues to find great pleasure in their dramatics. Terryn aides Rey in building her own saber, and D-O follows wherever Terryn goes. Ben softens to Terryn and even shows him how to play a few games he’d retrieved from inside the bench seats of the Falcon — still there, after all these years. There are a few days when the two slip off somewhere together for the afternoon, allowing Rey to finish her saber in peace. Pasha tends to the moisture farms. Rey tries to help Pasha with meal preparation whenever Pasha is willing, but mostly she isn’t.

Her saber is finished. Ben inspects it for her, turning it over in his hands. He is in awe of her handiwork, though he pretends he could do better. “It’s got a nice weight to it,” he says. “Not bad for your first.” He turns the knob and releases the flame. He is unable to mask his surprise. “It’s yellow.”

“There is no more red,” is her answer. “There is no more blue.” She’d been unsurprised when she’d been drawn to the crystal. This is for her, and this is for him.

She doesn’t have to expand on this. With a single nod, he communicates his understanding of the true depth of her words and what this means going forward. 

“It’s stable.” He swings it around himself, testing out the give and take. “However... there’s really only one way to find out its true abilities...” With a mad spark in his eyes, he takes battle stance and swings at Rey in the offensive.

Rey, without thought and entirely on pure and involuntary impulse, draws Luke Skywalker’s saber from its holster at her hip, ignites it, and blocks Ben’s attack. Her initial reaction is shock, and then when that wears off, fear, and then when she sees the subtle smirk on Ben’s lips, excitement. The hair on her arms stands on end in anticipation and adrenaline. Ben, eager to show off, takes another step and strikes again, this time with more force. Rey blocks him again, of course, and easily. This time it is she who spins and makes an offensive attack. His smirk growns to a grin.

They are sparring, then, on the sands of his grandfather’s and uncle’s home planet,in the small field behind the home of Pasha Frenk, stretching muscles that have laid dormant for weeks, stretching muscles that they hadn’t known were aching to be stretched.

It is almost a fair fight — for how can it not be when they are in each others’ heads and can see each others’ next moves? Rey is smart and resilient and intuitive; Ben is strong and skilled and forward-thinking. It is  almost a fair fight because eventually Ben succumbs to the stretching of his not-nearly-healed appendages, and Rey bests him, he on his knees and Luke’s saber at his neck. The two of them freeze for a moment, chests heaving and breathing heavily, Ben de-weaponed and Rey holding his life in her hands yet again, and a certain energy passes through them, and at the same time that Rey drops the saber, Ben is standing and lifting her to meet him.

With one hand buried in his hair, Rey uses the other to call Luke’s saber to her and back into its holster at her hip. With one hand underneath Rey to hold her up, Ben uses his other to call her saber to him and into the holster at his hip.

Desperately clinging to each other and with tongues entwined, Ben carries Rey into the hut.

* * *

Late one evening, after Rey and Ben had been making a few small repairs on the Falcon to prepare it for their leave, they arrive back to the home after dark to find a somber scene awaiting them. Terryn is in his bed, eyes closed, breathing in the treatment that comes from the end of Doc’s arm as Pasha sits at the foot of the bed and holds his hand. This is normal and happens once every two weeks. Usual. What’s not usual is the fact that Terryn is not still or sleeping. Terryn is sitting up and gasping for the medicine, one hand gripped tightly around the mask he wears. He is having trouble breathing. Much more trouble than usual.

Rey immediately moves to step into the room, but Ben stops her with a hand on her arm, trepidatious. Rey gives him a look to say ‘ _It’s okay; trust me_ _._ ’ She enters the room, but Ben stays just outside the threshold. First, Rey goes to Pasha. She announces her presence with a small touch to Pasha’s shoulder. Pasha, normally averse to any sort of display of affection and  never one to ask for help, looks up at Rey with desperate eyes.

Without a second thought, Rey puts a hand to Terryn’s chest. Terryn doesn’t seem to notice. Ben notices. He doesn’t think it will work. It only worked for them on each other because they’re a dyad... right?

Rey closes her eyes in concentration. She uses the force to tune into Terryn’s lungs. She breathes deeply. She finds her center and fully realizes it in her mind, imagining that she’s pulling it up her torso, through her shoulder, down her arm, into her fingers, and into Terryn’s chest. Terryn gasps loudly once and moves his grasp from the mask and onto Rey’s hand. He coughs a few times and tries to breathe deeper. Doc removes the mask from Terryn’s face, the metal pieces transforming back into her hand. The medicine is all used up, gone. Yet Terryn is still choking and gasping.

Ben moves into the room, then, and he takes two long strides to the bed and to Rey’s side. He places his hand on Terryn’s back, directly above his lungs. With one cleansing breath, his mind is cleared and determined. He focuses on his center and pictures it in his mind, pulling it up and out of him just as Rey had done. After a few moments of concentration, Terryn’s choking subsides. After a few moments further, his breathing evens out. After just a moment more, he is able to breathe in as deep as his lungs will allow.

Rey and Ben remove their hands from Terryn’s tiny frame in synchronization. Terryn breathes so easily and deeply that he laughs with relief. He lunges for his mother and Pasha pulls him into her. She is crying and laughing, two things neither Rey nor Ben have ever witnessed from her. She is holding onto her son tightly and repeating, “Thank you; thank you; thank you.” 

Rey takes Ben’s hand and they exit the room slowly. Terryn will never have to take another breathing treatment ever again.

* * *

Three days later, Ben and Rey are ready to depart from Tatooine.

The six of them stand just outside of the front door of the Frenk residence — Rey, Ben, Pasha, Terryn, Doc, and D-O. Pasha has baked them a loaf of bread and packs them a thermos of soup for the trip. She hands the food to Rey who graciously accepts it. Pasha’s manner has changed over the past three days. She has been less stern, less standoffish. Rey has noticed a new look in her eyes. A softer one.

“I don’t know how — what I could do — how I could ever—“ Pasha clears her throat and blinks a few times very hard. She restarts. “You saved my son. He is all I have. You  healed him.” In an uncharacteristic display of affection, Pasha reaches out a hand and places it atop Ben’s arm. “Both of you.” And in that moment, Ben knows he has been forgiven for the crimes of Kylo Ren, a forgiveness he does not deserve. “How could I ever repay you?” she asks vulnerably.

Rey sets her own hand atop Pasha’s arm, then, completing the circle. “You already have.” And what she says is true. Without Pasha’s grace, Ben may not have survived. He certainly wouldn’t have healed as completely as he had.

Pasha doesn’t say goodbye. Instead, she says, “You are both welcome here.”

Next it is Terryn’s turn to bid the pair farewell. He brings forth something that he has been hiding behind his back. “I made you something, Rey.” He hands her a miniature sculpture of what looks to be a young boy with curly hair and a single-wheeled droid at his feet with a head shaped like a bucket on its side. She takes it in her hands and the chalky texture confirms her suspicion that it is made out of baked sand and clay. Tiny clay Terryn has small rocks for eyes and a piece of string for a belt. 

Terryn beams as Rey views his handiwork. Pasha runs a hand through her son’s fluffy hair to show her pride. “I made it all by myself!” After a look from Ben, Terryn adds, “Well, Ben helped. _A_ _little_. But it was mostly me.” 

Rey gives Ben a quick glance to see that he is smirking down at Terryn. This must’ve been what they were doing those couple of evenings without her. “It’s lovely,” she says to Terryn. “A perfect likeness.”

“It’s so you don’t forget us.”

Rey gets a bit choked up herself at this. She sets the figurine and the food aside and kneels in front of Terryn. “There is nothing in the entire galaxy that could ever make me forget you, Terryn Frenk.” Terryn grins from ear to ear and throws his arms around Rey’s shoulders in a painfully tight embrace.

“Will you for-forget D-O?”

Rey had decided yesterday upon ther final inspection of the ship that she would leave D-O with Terryn if Pasha was alright with it. The simple droid had taken so quickly and fiercely to the boy — it’d be criminal to part them now. “Of course not,” Rey assures him with a pat to his head. “Not with all the help you’ve been around here.” She winks at Terryn and stands.

Ben reaches out a hand to Terryn, possibly for him to shake it. “Until we meet again,” he says, his voice gruff. Rey can tell he is holding back some emotions of his own. The truth is that Ben has felt a sort of catharsis over the past months, a reconciliation of a part of himself that has been hurting for such a long time. He had come to sort of enjoy playing the role of the father figure to this boy, however silly it may sound. He was able to, if only for a short while, provide Terryn with something that Ben himself wished so terribly that he had had more of at that age, or at  any age — attention. And not just attention, but attention from an older male role model of sorts. When Terryn had mentioned a going-away present, Ben had looked around them at the vast expanse of sand and had suggested the clay model.

Terryn disregards Ben’s hand entirely and instead lunges for his legs, wrapping his arms around Ben’s knees and squeezing tightly. Ben, feeling uncomfortable but bearing it, pats his small friend on the head. “I’ll miss you, kid,” he says quietly. And then he clears his throat, for he’d sounded much too much like his father for him to be comfortable with.

Doc hands Ben a tiny cloth sack of medical supplies — liquid drops to add to tea to numb any extra pain, a wrap of bandages even though his wounds have all closed up by now, bacta ointment. “You take care of yourself, now, honey,” she says in her nasally intonation. “I don’t want to see you in my med bay again unless it’s to deliver that baby!”

“ _What_ baby?” Rey asks, a frenzy in her voice.

Doc directs her answer to Ben. “Grown folk don’t copulate every night unless they’re trying to make another one of them,” she states matter-of-factly. Ben wants to answer something along the lines of how most grown folk aren’t able to feel what they’re feeling and  also what their partner is feeling at the same time, to put some perspective on the matter, but one glance at Pasha’s mortified face tells him that this was something she had perhaps divulged exasperatedly and in confidence to Doc and something Doc should not have repeated.

Rey’s entire face goes hot as she realizes the exact same thing Ben has about the secret conversations between master and droid. She clutches at her gifts to keep from speaking.

“What’s ‘copulating’ mean?” Terryn asks.

Pasha nearly shrieks before she snaps her lips closed to stifle the sound. “Well, then, I think it’s best we let Rey and Ben go on their way. They’ve a long journey ahead.”

“You never did tell us where you’re going, loves,” Doc reminds them, completely unphased by the damage she’s just done.

Rey’s eyes sparkle as she answers. “Naboo.” She glances over at Ben sheepishly. “But we’ve one quick stop to make first.”

* * *

Owen and Beru Skywalker’s former hut — long having been abandoned — is more of a relic now than a shelter. It is the only standing building for miles in either direction. Rey’s entire body buzzes as they near it; she can feel Luke’s presence here atop the rubble where he once stood, did his chores, ate his meals, built spareparts, laid to bed. Ben’s entire body emanates annoyance and trepidation, but he can’t deny there is a small part of him that holds a certain curiosity about the place where his uncle grew up, the place his uncle left to become a jedi like his father before him, thus unknowingly sealing the fate of his unborn nephew.

Ben would not have chosen the life of a jedi knight if he’d been given any choice in the matter.

It was obvious, even in his boyhood, how spectacular of a connection to the force he had, and there was no question at all, in Leia’s eyes, that he should be trained. Han thought that Ben might be better suited for the type of work more along the lines of what  he did and, in hindsight, Ben can see how that path would’ve formed before him very clearly. All he wanted in his teenaged years, however, was to be away from the both of them, so to Luke’s academy he went.

The two of them enter the hut, or what’s left of it, at least. Rey pulls a piece of forgotten scrap metal out of the sand, both blown in by the wind. She sits cross-legged atop it and Ben pushes her with the force. She slides down a mound of sand, down past the moisture guages, smiling as she goes. He meets her at the bottom. Rey looks into a room and imagines a young Luke wishes there was more to see, more to be learned. But any clues that pointed back towards Master Luke had long been washed away from this place.

In the yard out front, Rey lays out a brown cloth atop the sand, one that she’d been holding onto for the right moment. Ben joins her in kneeling atop the sand. She places Luke’s saber atop the cloth and he places Leia’s. She folds the cloth around them gingerly and ties them together with the utmost care. She looks up at Ben and, together, they reach their hands to the ground and push the sabers down, down, down into the earth.

Ben takes her hand in his, understanding the difficulty and the gravity of her decision to bury them, to lay them to rest along with the complicated history that they paved. A history that brought them together.

Before too long, they stand, and Rey ceremoniously pulls her saber from her hip and, spinning the knob, ignites it. Lost in a sort of honorable, memoralizing trance, it is only then that either Ben or Rey notice the lone woman. She is older and wearing humble, mismatched robes and guiding along a two-humped mammal. Startled, Rey stands, holstering her saber. Ben joins her.

“There’s been no one for so long,” the woman speaks, her voice frail. It is obvious that this is a trek that the woman has had to make many, many times before. Rey wonders if this woman perhaps remembers Owen and Beru. Maybe she remembers Luke. Maybe she can tell them about him, how he was back then, what he was like.

Before Rey can ask, the woman asks first. “Who are you?”

A moment’s pause passes as everyone contemplates the other.

“I’m Ben.” Ben surprises both of them by speaking first and firmly. “Ben Solo. Son of General Leia Organa and rebel fighter Han Solo.” This is the very first time in his thirty years that he’s ever felt pride upon his lineage. He stands up a bit straighter. Perhaps he has been humbled over the past couple of months. Perhaps he is still somewhat used to commanding respect from strangers.

The woman tightens her lips as to display her dissatisfaction with this answer. “And  _you_ , child?” she directs to Rey, the wielder of the lightsaber she had seen.

“I’m Rey.”

“Rey who?”

Rey takes a moment to consider her answer. The horrid truth is that she is a Palpatine by blood, no matter how much she wishes it weren’t so. If she were being truly honest, she wishes she were a Skywalker. She wishes Luke were her real father, not the coward who left her alone on Jakku. She lets herself imagine, for the briefest of moments, one day becoming a Solo. Ben sees this in her thoughts and lets out a smug little “hmph” which she ignores. The absolute apex of each of her plights for all of her twenty years has culminated neatly into a single question — _Who_ _ am I?_

Well. She’s _Rey_.

Rey, orphaned scavenger.  
Rey, resistance fighter.  
Rey, pupil of the force.  
Rey, the last Jedi Knight.

As the two suns sink into the horizon on Tatooine, Rey also sets on a decision. A decision that she is enough.

She smiles warmly at the woman. “Just Rey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be an epilogue. :)


End file.
